The book presents a feminist perspective on all of these events with one woman saying "Unlike men, [women] were not interested in credit, only success, and laid their plans accordingly. When one of her medical school professors, a Tamil feminist and dissident, invites her to join a secret project documenting human rights violations, she embarks on a dangerous path that will change her forever. Prior to reading this book I had no knowledge of this civil war, which occurred while I was growing up. Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for an advance review copy in exchange for an honest review. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications.

There are no good guys in war, and it’s easy to condemn actions from the outside, but who knows what each of us would do to keep our families safe? In “Brotherless Night” this pain is strikingly brought to life through the eyes of Sashi, a beautifully realized character who reminds us horror is often suffered by humanity in places not necessarily illuminated by our newsfeed or social media trends.

An inconvenient sister” among four brothers, Sashi is even-keeled, determined, on her way to becoming a doctor. Riveting, heartbreaking and extraordinary for both its empathetic gaze and its clear-eyed depiction of the brutality of war, Brotherless Night is a masterpiece. Those sentences not only are a pleasure to read but they powerfully move the story and convey precisely what the narrator thinks and feels.

At the same time though shrinking these stories to bite sized "we were pure and innocent bystanders and then the Nazis killed my husband and I feel sad but I have pluck" narratives diminishes the real story. Her voice is one, that you will never forget, and as the reader you are forced again and again to ask yourself - What would you do? It’s about all the ugly little human complexities those words are designed to obliterate, about what it means to have a much less straightforward relationship with violence and the people responsible for it. Eventually, Sashi herself finds herself drawn into the conflict herself, in ways that I don’t want to spoil but found deeply resonant.The good guys are ruthless, people she loves take incredibly cruel actions, and Sashi finds that even following her conscience has regrettable consequences. But over the next decade, a vicious civil war tears through her home, and her dream spins off course as she sees her four beloved brothers and their friend K swept up in the mounting violence. This novel did a good job of explaining what it would be like to live in a civil war, faced with impossible choices to make. The main groups/factions conducted themselves in complicated ways and many transformed into multi-headed monsters.

Life in an underground bunker: "When we ran to the bunkers we tried to remember to carry our torches so that we could check for snakes. The story is told by Sashi, who at 16 lives with her mum, dad, and 4 brothers in a village in Jaffna.People are horrific to each other, and yet their sacrifice for each other to pursue truth and their right to life is equally matched so that, somehow, balance is achieved. V. Ganeshananthan cast us as witnesses alongside Sashi to the scorched earth unfolding in the wake of the fight.

Ganeshananthan drew me in from the very first line, and the intricacies of her characters’ lives made it easy to stay. Her story becomes a first-hand account of the life, violence and reality of this time as unrest and eventually a civil war breaks out around them.Her name is Anjali and she’s one of Sashi’s medical school professors AND she’s based on a real Sri Lankan woman and activist.